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Tuesday, August 25, 2015

EJ7NET Gola Island activation is QRT with 4,500+ QSOs

It's the end of the Gola activation. The EJ7NET operation from the island is now officially QRT. All stations have been dismantled and the antennas are put away. We had a fantastic run on 40 metres SSB this evening, with great conditions into the UK and Europe and a sustained pile-up. I was glad to have had the opportunity to work the pile for a couple of hours and it was exhilarating.

These are our final statistics. As you can see, we had a huge amount of action on 40, 30 and 20 metres, with total CW QSOs dominating at 3,252 compared with 1,299 phone contacts. We managed just 17 QSOs on 6 metres, which was not bad considering the band never really opened. 15 metres was a huge disappointment, but we got some nice runs into Japan on 17 CW on Monday and Tuesday around lunchtime which helped build up the total. 30 metres was a real "bread and butter" band, with almost constant activity. We feel that our location close to the Atlantic Ocean certainly helped our Q rate.

We celebrated our significant total with a nice meal cooked by Tony EI3HA consisting of half pounder beef burgers washed down with a glass or two of red wine.

The weather turned inclement again and it was raining while the antennas were being taken down. The team has to retire early because we have to be up at dawn so that we can get all our gear down to the pier where the boat back to the mainland arrives at 9am.

Gordon made a few videos of me running the 40m SSB pile-up. Because I'm on limited mobile phone data, I'll wait until I get home to upload them so look out for a further update tomorrow.